Thousands of pages of court documents show how the Archdiocese of Los Angeles for decades knowingly shielded more than a dozen priests suspected of child sex abuse.

A Los Angeles News Group special report offers an in-depth look into how and when the church knew about the abuse and chose instead to move accused priests from parish to parish, even allowing the most abusive to move out of the country.

Church officials in some cases tried to get priests into therapy, but at the same time took steps to keep the horrific accusations from ever surfacing or being reported to authorities. Victims and their families pleaded for justice, only to fall on deaf ears. This report details the depth of secrecy and covert actions taken by top church officials to keep the accusations in the shadows.

In the decades since, archdioceses everywhere have taken steps to recognize and stop such abuse from happening again.

In the meantime, victims feel the weight and still live in the shadow of abuse.

What transpired in the predominantly Latino congregation in East L.A., and at nearby St. Agatha's Church, is at the heart of a suit that led to the release last week of thousands of pages of personnel documents.

A 35-year-old man who says he was molested by the priest as a youth claims church leaders knew Aguilar Rivera was a pedophile when they assigned him to the two local parishes and that they knowingly concealed his misdeeds.

In a scandal that implicated dozens of priests in the Los Angeles Archdiocese, the case of Father Michael Baker is the one that Cardinal Roger Mahony has said troubles him the most.

An energetic priest who was popular with the young people in his congregations, Baker confided to Mahony during a spiritual retreat in late December 1986 that he'd molested two young boys from 1978-85.

Father James M. Ford's career in the Los Angeles Archdiocese didn't end until 2005, though he faced questions back to the early 1980s about inappropriate contact with male students and was known to have had an affair with a former seminary student who died of AIDS, according to his personnel files.

It took 30 years for the victim of Father Matthew Michael Sprouffske to work up the courage to confront her abuser, and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

It was 1986 when the woman penned two eloquent and powerful missives, one to Sprouffske and one to Monsignor John Rawden, an archdiocese official, and she spoke plainly about the abuse she suffered from the age of about 4 until 16.

In the case of Father Michael Daniel Buckley, the signs of abuse were there as early as 1965.

That was the year parents of children at Immaculate Conception Church in Monrovia sent two letters to then-Bishop Timothy Manning demanding Buckley's removal due to "grave moral reasons" and threatening to picket if their demands were not met.

The case files of Father Santiago Tamayo and Father Angel Cruces read like lurid dime-store novels.

Appropriately enough, the tales of how Tamayo, Cruces and five other priests sexually assaulted a 16-year-old girl were fodder for the tabloids in the 1980s, which dubbed it "Snow White and the Seven Priests."

In a 2004 letter to the Vatican, Cardinal Roger Mahony revealed that a priest within the Los Angeles Archdiocese was a danger to children and must be dismissed.

"(Father) Caffoe has not truly resolved his inner anger and sexual tension, so that he remains a real threat to minors. This is confirmed by his subsequent behavior," Mahony wrote to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI.

Father Eleutorio Ramos admitted to police in Orange County that he had molested at least 25 boys over the span of a decade. It was, according to published reports, the largest single admission of child abuse in the history of the Orange County diocese